Still Running, Still Dreaming...

...Still Benji

There were tales of triple sweatsuits worn on 90-degree days in Stone Mountain, just outside Atlanta. Of a 23-mile training run completed on the concourse of the University of Georgia’s Stegmann Coliseum while remnants of a hurricane battered Athens. Of quitting the University of Georgia track team after the head coach labeled him a quitter. Stories such as these—all true, by the way—earned Benji Durden a reputation as being something of a flake, but everything of the self-made Olympian.

Durden came to prominence on the roads at the very height of American distance running and recorded 25 sub-2:20 marathons in less than a decade, with a PR of 2:09:58. He ranked in the U.S. top 10 six straight years and finished 1982 at #7 in the world. And when Durden qualified for the U.S. Olympic team a quarter century ago, he did so against the deepest field of American marathoners ever assembled.

If any of those who toed the line in Buffalo on May 24, 1980, was his own man, it was Benji Durden, who now 25 years on still conjures his own unique ideas and possesses a keen mind and more than a little self-confidence. Durden may have rubbed a few of his competitors the wrong way back then, but the majority loved him for his charisma and tenacity. Those who really got to know him found all sorts of other endearing qualities, not least of which was the ability to chase a dream.

The first running of Benji Durden’s career was down a pole vault runway during his junior high school days in Sacramento, CA. But Durden found he lacked sufficient upper body strength, and his coach moved him to the 600 yards. “I really wasn’t very good,” Durden recalls. “I think I ran 2:05 at age 12. But I had already decided to become a miler, because I wanted to be the next Jim Ryun.” His first chance to try the mile came in ninth grade, in the spring of 1966. “I ran 5:00 flat in my last race that season, which I figured was OK. But there were some ninth-graders in California running 30 seconds faster, so I decided I’d better focus on band.

”Durden’s father retired from the military that summer, and the family left California for south Georgia, where Benji finished out high school in the small town of Jesup. He gave no thought to resuming his track career until noticing that the school record for the mile was only 5:05. “I knew I could run that fast,” Durden says, “so I joined the team.” Sure enough, Durden ran 4:55 his sophomore year, but the school record holder finished a couple of strides ahead. During his junior season, however, Durden sped to a 4:36 and put his name in the annals of Jesup High School track and field lore. Injuries his senior year prevented any improvement, but to this day no one in Wayne County has run faster.

In the fall of 1969, Durden arrived at the University of Georgia in Athens, about an hour east of Atlanta. His plans for college didn’t include competitive running, but he didn’t balk when a new acquaintance suggested he walk on with the cross country team. Working his way up to finish the season as #3 man, Durden was awarded a partial scholarship to continue with track. “We were a poor enough team in terms of middle-distance and distance runners that I was able to prosper,” Durden laughs. Pegged as a miler by UGA head coach Forrest “Spec” Towns, the 1936 Olympic gold medalist in the 110 hurdles, Durden ran a respectable 4:15 his freshman season and was well satisfied.

But Durden was anything but pleased with how things went the next two years. Stagnating in a program that dished out a lot of speedwork and precious little distance, Durden never improved on his freshman year 4:15. “I was a miler at Georgia only because we needed milers,” he explains, “and we were actually trained as 800-meter runners.” In the spring of 1972, Coach Towns extended Durden no sympathy when he begged out of a meet with a badly sprained ankle. “He called me a quitter,” Durden laughs. “So I quit! And then I proceeded to beat everybody on the team on my own. I stopped worrying about the mile and started running longer races.”

After graduating from UGA in 1973, Durden remained in Athens for a few years and completed most of the coursework toward a doctorate in biopsychology. He also co-founded the Athens Track Club and helped put on road races—an activity that would eventually become his livelihood—and he started thinking about the Olympic Trials. Qualifying at 10,000m briefly occupied his thoughts, but then he calculated that a 2:23 marathon meant only 5:20 per mile and “on paper it looked like I could do that,” he explains. “It didn’t sound like a big deal. But it turned out it was.” Although he raced frequently at all distances in the mid-1970s, Durden enjoyed little success, and his first several marathon experiences were humbling.

Undaunted, Durden tinkered with his training by adding a little more mileage and slowing down his long runs. And while he failed to qualify for the 1976 Trials, he continued thinking of the Olympics. “I never sat down and said ‘OK, I’m going to make a career out of running,’” he recalls. “It was just ‘OK, I’m going to get good at this.’ And you know, along the way I had dreams. But of course I didn’t talk about them, because they were just dreams.”

In October 1976 Durden surprised himself and everyone else with a 2:20:23 second-place run at the AAU National Marathon Championship in Lafayette, LA. “I discovered I was a marathoner after all,” he says. It was around this time that Durden left Athens for the Atlanta area, and he and his first wife, Barbara, eventually settled in Stone Mountain. Durden quickly became a fixture of the Atlanta-area running scene and began working at Jeff Galloway’s Phidippides running shop in the Ansley Mall, not far from Piedmont Park and the finish of the Peachtree Road Race.

Almost certainly the greatest benefit of relocating near Atlanta was the deepening of his friendship with Lee Fidler, a graduate of Furman University, who Durden had run against during college as well as more recently. A journeyman distance runner who never quite achieved a U.S. top 10 marathon ranking, Fidler was a few years older than Durden and considerably more experienced, having already run the 1972 and 1976 Olympic marathon trials as well as a 2:16:51 for 11th at Boston in 1975. Fidler also worked for Galloway, and at about 4:00 each afternoon, the pair joined a core group of Phidippides employees in slipping out the door for a training run.

Eventually Durden and Fidler split from the Phidippides group, mainly because nearly every afternoon run turned into a race. “We found we could work really hard and productively together without it getting to the point of racing in workouts,” Fidler explains. “We just didn’t feel we had to prove anything to each other.”

Durden picked up his first marathon win in 1977 at the Carolina Marathon in 2:19.04. His first Boston experience a couple months later was a disappointing 2:24:29 for 27th place, seven spots behind Fidler, whose 2:23:42 was not one of his better finishes either. Durden started three more marathons in 1977, finishing two and winning one. In between were a slew road races at shorter distances. “We did race a lot,” notes Fidler. “I usually ran about 25 races and three or four marathons each year, and Benji raced a little more.”

The pair took aim at Boston as they trained through the winter of 1978, and the work paid off as both scored PRs. “That was a real breakthrough,” Durden says of his 11th-place finish in 2:15:04. “Lee came up on me near halfway, as we were going through Wellesley, and went right by me. I was only in about 25th at that point and actually fading just a little, so his passing me got me focused again, and I ran solid the rest of the race. It was a good feeling to have one click.” Fidler crossed the finish line 14th, in 2:16:14.

Durden finished six marathons in the next 18 months, all in the 2:13–2:18 range with one victory (Pittsburgh in 1978). No question about it, he was getting there. By this time virtually all of his training was being done with Fidler or on his own. “It dawned on me, training for Boston in ’78, that the very hard/very easy approach was what I needed to do,” he says. “Lee and I trained well together because we could put our egos on hold.”

Always looking for a better approach, Durden began running in several layers of sweatsuits even in the Georgia heat, and he also did some of his weekly mileage wearing an altitude simulator. Fidler experimented with overdressing as well but never became a devotee. “The heat training probably had a similar effect to running at altitude,” Fidler says. “And I suppose it also had a callusing effect on him. But I didn’t quite buy into it as much as he did. In hot weather you wouldn’t find me wearing two or three layers. Once Benji started doing it, though, it was almost every day.”

The 1980 Olympic Trials marathon, run from Buffalo, NY, to Niagara Falls, Ontario, was deeper than any before or since, with some 56 runners finishing under 2:20. The assembly of athletes knew the United States would boycott the Moscow Olympics, but that knowledge did nothing to lessen their resolve to make the team. Durden felt fit enough to stay with the lead pack and ran confidently for 30K. At that point, however, he realized most of those around him were faster 10K runners; if he was to have any chance at a top-three finish, he had to make a move. So Durden threw in a 4:40 mile, followed that with two more in 4:50, and pulled away. Although he was caught and passed by Tony Sandoval a couple miles later, Durden held on for second in 2:10:41, a PR by more than three minutes.

Frustration with missing the Olympics notwithstanding, Durden was eager to jump back into another marathon after his strong Trials performance. “At first I got a little bit full of myself,” he admits. “I thought ‘OK, I’ve got this licked’ and went out to Nike-OTC that fall. But I got careless and tied my shoes too tight, and even though I was running comfortably, with Dick Quax and Bobby Hodge, I got to 21 miles and couldn’t lift my foot anymore.”

“Next was Fukuoka,” Durden continues, “which I sort of viewed as my Olympic marathon. But I overtrained for it and ran poorly, which was really disappointing. I got a little more rational after that.” Five weeks after Fukuoka, Durden ran 2:12:34 to win the Orange Bowl Marathon in Miami, and the very next month he finished fourth in Tokyo in 2:13:07. So “rational” didn’t exactly translate into racing sparingly, but who could argue with the results?

Probably the finest stretch of marathoning in Durden’s career came between late 1981 and Boston in 1983. He had an impressive string of three wins, beginning in September 1981 with Nike-OTC (2:12:12) and followed by Houston (2:11:11) and Montreal (2:13:22), both in early 1982. “Nike-OTC was possibly my best marathon because I was dominant throughout,” Durden recalls. “Plus it was the first big prize-money race that I won on the ARRA [Association of Road Racing Athletes] circuit, and it just had a lot of symbolism for me. And Houston was the first time I beat Bill Rodgers in a marathon, and Dick Beardsley was there also.” A case of the flu forced Durden to miss Boston in 1982, “which was disappointing because that was the Beardsley–Salazar year, and I felt I would have been a factor,” he says. “But you know, it’s one of those things you can’t do anything about.”

After missing Boston, Durden was determined to make a strong showing the next spring. He had finished second at Houston in January and knew he was ready as Patriots’ Day approached. The pace was fast from the start, and Durden assumed the lead near halfway. Unfortunately, two things began working to his disadvantage: One was favorite Greg Meyer’s supreme fitness, the other was the worst case of blistered feet he would ever experience in a major race.“

Halfway down the Newton Hills, a blister on my left foot burst, and I had hamburger on the ball of my foot,” he recalls. “I had to start landing on the outside of that foot, and I ended up straining the plantar fascia.” Passed by Ron Tabb in the final miles, Durden held on for third in a new personal best of 2:09:58. The plantar fascia strain didn’t seem serious at first as he began preparations for the World Championships in Helsinki, never dreaming his best race had been run. Helsinki saw an anguished Durden struggle home in 2:20:38 for 39th. Two months later he won the Toronto Marathon in 2:15:16, but felt the plantar fascia tear during the final mile.

The next five or six years constituted a series of ups and downs for Durden, who was continually frustrated by the chronic plantar fascia injury. He never came within five minutes of his PR and dropped out of several marathons, including the 1984 Olympic Trials. Having divorced and left Stone Mountain for Nashville in 1983, Durden moved on to Boulder in 1985 and hoped to revitalize his running. He did manage to run 2:18:21 at Houston in 1986, but it proved to be his final sub-2:20 performance. Though only 35, Durden’s days as an elite runner had come to an end.

Back during his Stone Mountain days, Durden had begun coaching area athletes with Fidler. It began as something they cooked up just to make ends meet, and the truth was Fidler did nearly all of the actual coaching. But Durden felt it was something he could do well, and in early 1985, a few months before moving to Boulder with his fiancée Amie, he began working with Kim Jones. Despite an auspicious 2:48 marathon debut, Jones was still a neophyte, running just 25 to 30 miles a week. She had come to Durden at the suggestion of 1976 Olympian Don Kardong, and it proved to be an ideal coach–athlete relationship.“

Benji got to know me well,” Jones explains, “and he realized I needed to build strength but didn’t need really high mileage. My longest training run for that first marathon had been 10 miles, but Benji wasn’t about to jump my mileage to what the top women were running.” After barely six months with Durden, and up to an average of only about 45 miles a week, Jones ran 2:35:59 for second at the 1985 Twin Cities Marathon; by the end of 1986 she still hadn’t topped 80 miles a week and yet was ranked #1 in the country. Jones and Durden continued working together over the next decade, during which Jones ranked as high as #3 in the world (1989) and ran 2:26:40 to place second at Boston in 1991.

“Benji worked with me in a gentle way,” Jones explains, “and I think his approach made me the best marathoner I could have possibly become. I didn’t have a single overuse injury because of his guidance.” Was Durden never wrong? “Well,” Jones laughs, “I objected when he wanted me to wear all those sweats. I tried it a couple times, getting ready for the World Cham-pionships, because it was supposed to be hot and humid. But I called him and said ‘Benji, I hate it! I hate these sweatsuits!’ And he just laughed, because he knew it didn’t work for me, and that was okay.”

Durden’s coaching business flourished in Boulder, and within a few years he found himself working with up to 30 athletes. “It got to be a little more than I could handle,” he admits. “A lot of the women I was working with were trying to qualify for the Trials, and quite a few made it. But I found I wasn’t even able to run much myself and I really was overextended.” As a result, Durden scaled back on the coaching and built up his race timing and scoring services. Today, his wife, Amie, is co-owner of the business and works alongside Durden, helping him handle as many as 85 events each year.“

Everybody involved with running and racing in Colorado loves Benji,” Jones says. “He’s there at most of the races, encouraging people to finish. He put a lot of time and effort into the sport for himself, and now he’s giving something back.” Durden also measures courses—“I’m considered the course guru in Boulder,” he says—in addition to editing the Boulder Roadrunners’ newsletter and maintaining the club website. “I wear a lot of different hats,” Durden explains. “And I see myself doing this for quite a while, unless somebody comes along and says ‘Benji, here’s a bunch of money—why don’t you just run?’ You know, I gotta pay the bills and buy the cat food.”

Living in Boulder, Durden can’t help but keep tabs on the present state of top level U.S. distance running, and he recognizes problems as well as recent improvements. “It seems we’re kind of where we were in the mid- to late-60s,” he says. “Track back then was the focus and where the talent was, and right now we’ve got several guys running 13:20 or better for 5,000 meters and some decent 10,000-meter runners. But what we’re missing is the numbers, to push more guys onto the roads. Some of these guys need to move up to the marathon sooner, but we don’t have the numbers yet to create that pressure.”

Durden is also troubled by drugs in the sport, “because,” he says, ‘it provides a built-in excuse. You get clobbered today and ‘Oh well, they were cheating. This is as good as I’ll ever get because I’m not going to cheat.’ I never had that limitation, because I wasn’t aware of anyone I raced against being dirty. I always felt, ‘Well, if so-and-so ran 2:08, maybe I can, too.’

”It has been a quarter of a century since the 1980 Olympic Trials marathon and two full decades since Durden and Fidler completed their last training run on Stone Mountain. Last fall, Durden began preparing for a winter marathon—his first marathon in 14 years, and he’s excited about it. Following a scare with prostate cancer two years ago, he decided he needed to change some of his priorities. “Something like that tends to make you say, ‘OK, what do I value in this life?’ Durden says. “And I realized I wasn’t doing the things I really enjoy the most. So now I’m running a lot more, and racing a little.”

“I guess Benji had an artistic approach to it,” says Fidler, as he thinks back on the way things were a quarter-century ago. “A lot of us were sort of obsessive and had to run X number of miles every week,” he continues. “That wasn’t Benji. He was willing to try different things and experimented a lot. He always seemed to be searching.”

Turns out, old Spec Towns was dead wrong in calling Benji Durden a quitter. Benji has continued to stay the course. His own course.